Jan. 18, 2012
Huong Nguyen
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-4789
huong.nguyen@nasa.gov
Ann Marie Trotta
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1601
ann.marie.trotta@nasa.gov
MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-07
NASA JOINS MIT AND DARPA FOR OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD STUDENT ROBOTIC CHALLENGE
Local NASA’s Ames Research Center engineer and mentor for a finalist
team available for interviews.
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA will join the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) and high school student teams from the U.S. and abroad for the
third annual Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge on Monday, Jan. 23. The
event will take place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass., and be
broadcast live on NASA Television from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST.
For the competition, NASA will upload software developed by high
school students onto Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient,
Experimental Satellites (SPHERES), which are bowling ball-sized
spherical satellites aboard the International Space Station. The top
27 teams from previous competitions will have their code sent Monday
to the space station, where an astronaut will command the satellites
to execute the teams’ flight program. During a simulated mission, the
teams will complete a special challenge inspired by future satellite
technologies, such as formation flight and close proximity
operations.
Student finalists will be able to see their flight program live in the
televised finals. The team with the highest software performance over
several rounds of the competition will win the challenge. The winning
team will be awarded certificates and a SPHERES flight patch that was
flown to the space station.
Wendy Holforty, an engineer from NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett
Field, Calif., and mentor for a finalist team, the CookieBots, will
be available for interviews. This is the first year the CookieBots
have competed in the Zero Robotics Competition and are sponsored by
The Space Cookies, an all-Girl Scout robotics team, the Girl Scouts
of Northern California and the NASA Robotics Alliance Project. To
schedule an interview with Holforty, contact Huong Nguyen at
650-604-4789 or huong.nguyen@nasa.gov.
News media wishing to cover this event must contact Caroline McCall at
MIT (cmccall5@mit.edu or 617-253-1682) by 2 p.m. EST on Friday, Jan
20. NASA officials and members of the astronaut corps will be
available to speak with news media after the competition.
In addition to their use in this competition, the satellites are used
inside the space station to conduct formation flight maneuvers for
spacecraft guidance navigation, control and docking. The three
separate satellites that make up SPHERES fly in formation inside the
space station's cabin. The satellites provide opportunities to test a
wide range of hardware and software at an affordable cost.
The SPHERES National Laboratory Facility on the station is operated
and maintained by NASA Ames.
For more about the Zero Robotics program, visit:
http://go.nasa.gov/zero-robotics
For more information about SPHERES, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/SPHERES.html
For NASA TV schedule and video streaming information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv
For more information about the space station, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/station
-end-